8 Titanosaur Facts and Figures
Here are some fast facts and figures to get you up to speed on the Museum’s new permanent resident:
This titanosaur weighed around 70 tons—as much as 10 African elephants.
The 122-foot-long cast is too large to fit into the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Orientation Center at the Museum. Its 39-foot-long neck extends out towards the elevator banks and its head, which hangs 9.5 feet above the floor, peeks out of the gallery to welcome visitors to the fossil floor.
With its neck up, this titanosaur is tall enough to peek into a five-story building.
Discovered in 2014 in Argentine Patagonia, this dinosaur is so new that it has not even been formally named by the scientists who discovered it, from Argentina’s Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio (MEF).
The life-sized cast was created over six months by Research Casting International in Ontario, Canada in association with Argentina’s MEF. The cast is based on 84 excavated fossil bones.
The skeleton on display doesn’t include any real fossils, which are far too heavy to mount. Instead, its bones are lightweight 3D prints made of fiberglass and based on digital copies of the original fossils.
Another large sauropod, Apatosaurus, which is also on display on the fourth floor of the Museum, is 86 feet long and in life would have weighed between 30 and 40 tons, roughly half the weight of this 70-ton titanosaur, which is one of the largest sauropods ever discovered.
The Museum’s 94-foot model of a blue whale is nearly 30 feet shorter than this titanosaur. But even with the discovery of this gigantic dinosaur, blue whales are still the heaviest species that ever existed. Blue whales weigh up to 200 tons, compared to this titanosaur’s 70 tons.
The Titanosaur is on view to the public starting January 15, 2016! Learn more.
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